Part 60 (2/2)
Fort Yukon has never been of importance as a mining centre, but has long been a great fur trading post for the Indians up the Porcupine. This trade has waned, however, and little remains but an Indian village and the old buildings of the post. We walked a mile into the woods to an old graveyard in a still, dim grove, probably the only one in the Arctic Circle.
CHAPTER XLVI
The Yukon is a mighty and a beautiful river, and its memory becomes more haunting and more compelling with the pa.s.sage of time. From the slender blue stream of its source, it grows, in its twenty-three hundred miles of wandering to the sea, to a width of sixty miles at its mouth. In its great course it widens, narrows, and widens; cuts through the foot-hills of vast mountain systems, spreads over flats, makes many splendid sweeping curves, and slides into hundreds of narrow channels around spruce-covered islands.
It is divided into four great districts, each of which has its own characteristic features. The valley extending from White Horse to some distance below Dawson is called the ”upper Yukon,” or ”upper Ramparts,”
the river having a width of half a mile and a current of four or five miles an hour, and the valley in this district being from one to three miles in width.
Following this are the great ”Flats”--of which one hears from his first hour on the Yukon; then, the ”Ramparts”; and last, the ”lower Yukon” or ”lower river.”
The Flats are vast lowlands stretching for two hundred miles along the river, with a width in places of a hundred miles. Their very monotony is picturesque and fascinates by its immensity. Countless islands are constantly forming, appearing and disappearing in the whimsical changes of the currents. Indian, white, and half-breed pilots patrol these reaches, guiding one steamer down and another up, and by constant travel keeping themselves fairly familiar with the changing currents.
Yet even these pilots frequently fail in their calculations.
At Eagle a couple of gentlemen joined our party down the river on the _Campbell_, expecting to meet the same day and return on the famous _Sarah_--as famous as a steamer as is the island of the same name on the inland pa.s.sage; but they went on and on and the _Sarah_ came not. One day, two days, three days, went by and they were still with us. One was in the customs service and his time was precious. Whenever we approached a bend in the river, they stood in the bow of the boat, eagerly staring ahead; but not until the fourth day did the cry of ”_Sarah_” ring through our steamer. Hastening on deck, we beheld her, white and s.h.i.+ning, on a sand-bar, where she had been lying for several days, notwithstanding the fact that she had an experienced pilot aboard.
Throughout the Flats lies a vast network of islands, estimated as high as ten thousand in number, threaded by countless channels, many of which have strong currents, while others are but still, sluggish sloughs.
Mountains line the far horizon lines, but so far away that they frequently appear as clouds of bluish pearl piled along the sky; at other times snow-peaks are distinctly visible. Cottonwoods, birches, and spruce trees cover the islands so heavily that, from the lower deck of a steamer, one would believe that he was drifting down the single channel of a narrow river, instead of down one channel of a river twenty miles wide.
It is within the Arctic Circle that the Yukon makes its sweeping bend from its northwest course to the southwest, and here it is entered by the Porcupine; twenty miles farther, by the Chandelar; and just above the Ramparts, by the Dall. These are the three important rivers of this stretch of the Yukon.
Many complain of the monotony of the Flats; but for me, there was not one dull or uninteresting hour on the Yukon. In my quiet home on summer evenings I can still see the men taking soundings from the square bow of our steamer and hear their hoa.r.s.e cries:--
”Six feet starboard! Five feet port! Seven feet starboard! Five feet port! Five feet starboard! Four feet port!” At the latter cry the silent watchers of the pilot-house came to attention, and we proceeded under slow bell until a greater depth was reached.
On the sh.o.r.es, as we swept past, we caught glimpses of dark figures and Indian villages, or, farther down the river, primitive Eskimo settlements; and the stillness, the pure and sparkling air, the untouched wilderness, the blue smoke of a wood-chopper's lonely fire, the wide s.p.a.ces swimming over us and on all sides of us, charmed our senses as only the elemental forces of nature can charm. One longs to stay awake always on this river; to pace the wide decks and be one with the solitude and the stillness that are not of the earth, as we know it, but of G.o.d, as we have dreamed of him.
The blue hills of the Ramparts are seen long before entering them. The valley contracts into a kind of canyon, from which the rampart-like walls of solid stone rise abruptly from the water. The hills are not so high as those of the Upper Ramparts, which bear marked resemblance to the lower; and although many consider the latter more picturesque, I must confess that I found no beauty below Dawson so majestic as that above. Many of the hills here have a rose-colored tinge, like the hills of Lake Bennett.
In places the river does not reach a width of half a mile and is deep and swift. The shadows between the high rock-bluffs and pinnacled cliffs take on the mysterious purple tones of twilight; many of the hills are covered with spruce, whose dark green blends agreeably with the gray and rose color. The bends here are sharp and many; at the Rapids the current is exceedingly rapid, and Dall reported a fall of twelve feet to the half mile, with the water running in sheets of foam over a granite island in the middle of the stream. This was on June 1, 1866. In August, 1883, Schwatka, after many hours of anxiety and dread of the reputed rapids, inquired of Indians and learned that he had already pa.s.sed them.
They were not formidable at the time of our voyage,--August,--and it is only during high stages of water that they present a bar to navigation.
We reached Rampart at six o'clock in the morning. After Tanana, this is the loveliest place on the Yukon. Its sparkling, emerald beauty shone under a silvery blue sky. There was a long street of artistic log houses and stores on a commanding bluff, up which paths wound from the water.
Roofs covered with earth and flowers, carried out in brilliant bloom over the porches, added the characteristic Yukon touch. Every door-yard and window blazed with color. Narrow paths ran through tall fireweed and gra.s.ses over and around the hill--each path terminating, like a winding lane, in a pretty log-cabin home. There was an atmosphere of cleanliness, tidiness, and thrift not found in other settlements along the Yukon.
Captain Mayo, who, with McQuesten, founded Rampart in 1873, still lives here. The two commercial companies have large stores and warehouses; and residences were comfortably, and even luxuriously, furnished.
Rampart is two hundred and thirty miles below Fort Yukon, and is about halfway between Dawson and the sea. It has a population of four or five hundred people--when they are in from the mines!--and almost as many fighting, hungry dogs. Its street winds, and the buildings follow its windings; sometimes it stops altogether, and the buildings stop with it--then both go on again; and in front of all the public buildings are clean rustic benches, where one may sit and ”look to the rose about him.” The river here is half a mile wide, and on its opposite sh.o.r.e the green fields of the government experimental station slope up from the water.
Gold was discovered on Minook Creek, half a mile from town, in 1895, and the camp is regarded as one of the most even producers in Alaska. In 1906, despite an unusually dry season, the output of the district was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
In the afternoon of the same day we reached Tanana, which is, as I have said, the most beautiful place on the Yukon. It has a splendid site on a level plateau; and all the springlike greenness, the cleanliness and order, the luxuriant vegetation, of Dawson, are outdone here. One walks in a maze of delight along streets of tropic, instead of arctic, bloom.
The log houses are set far back from the streets, and the deep dooryards are seas of tremulous color, through which neat paths lead to flower-roofed homes. Cleanliness, color, and perfume are everywhere delights, but on the lonely Yukon their unexpectedness is enchanting.
In 1900 Fort Gibbon was established here, and this post has the most attractive surroundings of any in Alaska. Tanana is situated at the mouth of the Tanana River, seventy-five miles below Rampart, and pa.s.sengers for Fairbanks connect here with luxurious steamers for a voyage of three hundred miles up the Tanana. It is a beautiful voyage and it ends at the most progressive and metropolitan town of the North.
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